From Rosanne Cash, a sonic travelogue through the South

Rosanne Cash talks about her new album “The River & The Thread” and her journeys through the South that inspired the music.

Rosanne Cash has Southern music in her blood, even though she’s pretty much a New Yorker. She grew up in Los Angeles and moved to Manhattan in the early 1990s.

Still, she’s Johnny’s daughter, and June Carter’s step-daughter, heir to one of country music’s greatest dynasties, and that makes her more than a tourist in places like Arkansas and Mississippi, where she made a series of road trips in recent years.

The journeys turned into the album, “The River & The Thread” and it’s a departure from her usual lineup of confessional tales direct from her personal diary. The Grammy-nominated collection is a sonic travelogue, loaded with Southern influences — Appalachian music, gospel, blues — co-authored by her co-pilot and husband, John Leventhal.

“We didn’t plan it all to happen like that,” said Cash, who performs in Parker Jan. 9 and Fort Collins the following night. “It was just that the South got so conflated in our minds and hearts on those trips.”

It’s easy to see how that would happen. Cash visited the grave of blues pioneer Robert Johnson and William Faulkner’s writing studio. She stopped at her father’s boyhood home, the experimental Dyess Colony, set up to help poor families escape the Depression.

She passed through Money, Miss., where 14-year-old African-American Emmett Till was murdered for flirting with a white woman in 1955. She drove over the Tallahatchie Bridge, the reincarnated version of the one made famous in singer Bobbie Gentry’s eerie “Ode to Billie Joe.”

“The River & The Thread” reports on all of that, taking on the good and the bad. The song “The Sunken Lands” tells of Dyess and its wrecking floods. “Money Road” hints at a tragedy that took place “a thousand miles from where we live,” as the lyrics go.

Cash recognizes she’s an outsider here. The music doesn’t judge as much as try to get to the emotional truth.

“The South has some profound darkness to it,” said Cash. “But also a profound beauty and something that’s quintessentially American.”

“The blues, the Appalachian music, Southern gospel, the slave songs that began all that, there’s nothing else like it.”

Cash and Leventhal play with genres throughout the record. “Tell Heaven” is an homage to the kind of gospel song you’d hear on Memphis radio. “When the Master Calls the Roll,” is a traditional country-style story song about a fallen Confederate soldier and the widow he leaves behind. The lyrics are rooted in Cash’s own family lore.

That’s what sets “The River & The Thread” apart from Cash’s other music, which tends to sounds confessional, intimate, almost until it hurts. Fans of her work — this is her 13th record — know all about her romantic breakups, her children, the deep mourning over her father and stepmother, who both died in 2003. Not the details exactly, but how it all felt to Cash.

At 59, she says, “Everything isn’t about lust and new love any more. Love is just as interesting, but the drama of love is not as interesting as how I’m connected to the rest of the world.”

She wants to learn about family, answer questions she never asked her parents, put the Cash family story together for her own children.

“These are subjects they need to know about, who they come from, that their great-grandmother was a cotton farmer and raised seven children without electricity. At my age, I care about who my people are, who I’m connected to, where the music comes from.”

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Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Arts and Entertainment writer and critic at The Denver Post and a regular contributor to Reverb.